Category: Bitesize

Los padres.

When my mate Guy was about to become a dad I followed him around with a couple of cameras. The result was two award-winning docs.

Probably time for part III.

Kid is going to rule the world.

Words that are like whaaaaa.

This man has been circulating on many peoples’ radar of late.

Wim Hof is his name.



Chilling in sub-zero temperatures is his game.

They call him the Ice Man, and he’s basically trying to get everyone to follow his sub-zero lead and alter their early morning shower and bath rituals in keeping with his philosophy; that prolonged exposure to very cold temperatures has a vast wealth of health benefits. Asides from shrivelling your nuts to pre-pubescent levels and halving your heating bill, apparently it’s supposed to make you feel great, something to do with oxygen to all parts of your body and dopamine and stuff.

Plus you get to look like a gee.

I then watched a most interesting video, about the merits of cold showers, and the importance of sleep.

At first I wondered if this stuff only applied to people with one syllable first names and surnames. Fuck it I thought, only one way to find out.

So I took the plunge.

That was one week ago. I’ve been having ice cold showers for one week. Do i feel better? I don’t fucking know. Am I confused?

Yes I fucking am.

I’ll tell you why. An ice cold shower is fundamentally a very unpleasant experience. Not even when you’re past the stage of hyper-ventilation and you’ve semi-gotten used to it, is it even vaguely enjoyable. I’m not going to lie, the immediate aftermath is other-worldly. The feeling as you dry yourself off and begin to warm up whilst still feeling all tingly is incredibly invigorating. Kind of like the feeling you get when you use that mint shower-gel, but with the bonus of not looking about twelve.

But the shower itself is I repeat not enjoyable.

Which throws up an important philosophical question. Should we do things that are fundamentally torturous because we know we’re going to feel better after having done them? That seems a little like focusing too much on the destination whilst letting the journey go to shit. Like living a life of pain and martyrdom only to earn eternal salvation once we move onto the next life. Sounds familiar.



Surely life is in the doing. And showers are one of life’s great pleasures. The last time I enjoyed a shower was over 8 days ago. At the moment they are sources of incredible discomfort for me. Just thinking about them at my desk makes me go all Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.

Stop taking cold showers then dickhead.

I CAN’T.

Because these one-syllables punks Wim Hof and Paul Chek have got me thinking that if I continue to prostrate myself at the hands of their cultish teachings, then my life is going to be better in a myriad of different ways. One of them says it’ll even improve my sex-life, which is interesting, seeing as I literally can’t remember the last time I had sex.

I can’t go back to the joys of hot showers because as much as I might enjoy being in them, I won’t enjoy the sadistic feeling of coming out of them. And now, if I even think of cranking the dial towards hot as I lie there in the foetal position convulsing in the corner of my shower crying out for it to stop, I keep imagining the Ice Man looking down on me and shaking his head sternly like the terrifying dude in the painting in Ghostbusters 2.

This sub-zero Catch 22 is ruining my life.



Fuck you Wim… I’m into it.

Stuck for real quality on Netflix?



Look no further.

I haven’t seen it admittedly.



Word on the street is that it’s feel-good.

But regardless of the documentary or the subject of it, who I met a couple of times and seems nice, it’s the review that has me salivating. It’s the only one on there, single-handedly responsible for the film’s one star rating. But it’s remarkable; a study in precision, syntax, and restraint. Whoever wrote it deserves a pulitzer.

Some dude came up to me once and said bro if your blog is called dropthebeatonit why the hell don’t you put more tunes up. I laughed and protested the last thing the world needed was more Shania Twain, knowing full-well my flashdance mc hammer shit would fly over the top of this guy’s dome. But now and again I come across a tune that emanates a love I feel morally obliged to spread.

If you see a homeless-looking dude on the streets of Melbourne with an outstanding collection of adidas sweats, odds-on you’ll be staring at Chet Faker aka Nick Murphy.

Below is I’m Into You.

No man has got me this aroused since Jay Kay dropped Space Cowboy back in ’98. This is the kind of tune that makes me want to buy a second hand keyboard and croon until my neighbours stage an intervention and I get evicted. Then I can look homeless too.

The verdict is in.



Girls want him. Guys want to be him.

Anyone selling a keyboard.

Amy.

This is really good.

The sad thing about a blockbuster film being made of a book you’re fond of is your imagination of the characters gets usurped. In my head  Gatsby was this elusive mélange of every ice-cold cat I’d ever encountered or seen a photo of once, all the more mystical because I’d have trouble describing how he appeared to me, except any time Fitzgerald conjured him on a page, and once more he’d enter stage right and reassemble in my head.

But now, try as I might, Gatsby is Leonardo di Caprio. Films make everything concrete, which cheapens the thrill of books, that they reside in your head. The love affair between you and your brain and the words lighting a spark in your imagination. Rather than you and fifty eight other popcorn-chomping profiles in silhouette watching Leo beam at you through 3D glasses.

Hey Leo, good luck with the following, seriously.

He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

F Scott Fitzgerald 1896-1940

We’ve all been there. Sunday night is creeping in. It’s go hard or go home time. The conundrum that makes mincemeat of those with unsturdy souls.

What in God’s name to order from Domino’s.

After much deliberation you opt to go all out for the large cheese crust, when you get sidelined by a pop-down option peddling two mediums for the price of one and a chicken goujon platter with dips thrown in.



In these times of nationwide austerity you get sucked in against your will and before you know it there’s an email from HQ saying your order is in the kitchen. Dazed and unsure as to what just happened, you settle onto the sofa and put your second pair of socks on. The pizza arrives. You take it down.

With attitude.



And then something cleaves your world in two. 

From the insipid glow of your laptop screen. That thing the popdown – the one that sold itself to you – had been obscuring. 

The Domino’s Hotdog Stuffed Crust.

Only available with a large. In what world could any medium pizza contend with that. At three times the price, you would’ve donated an organ just to be in the same room as that thing. The emptiness of someone with a full stomach surges through your blackened heart. The night is over, you hurl abuse at your flatmate about his mother and his sister, slam the door and hit the haystack.

That heady dough of mustard-infused bratwurst would’ve tasted wrong for all the right reasons. But you taste only the tang of defeat. Meanwhile someone takes a pizza slicer to your soul. In the knowledge you’ve fallen short of the stars, that day, a little of you dies.

Fitting then, that a man descending from the land of the pizza dropped a truth-bomb back in the day with a similar range of ballistics. This, from a man who rustled this up before he turned 25.

The greatest danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting out aim too low, and achieving our mark.

Michelangelo Buonarotti 1475-1564 Greatest artist in history, discuss

Carlito’s Way has spent much of the last decade hovering impatiently on the threshold of my top 5 films of all time, without getting in. The door is locked from the inside. But it goes without saying, in the Mediterranean bolthole of my all time top 10, Carlito’s Way can be found relaxing with a piña colada at the edges of the infinity pool round back.

It’s a story of decline and fall with a sprinkling of love and a bucketload of cocaine thrown in, one that an english teacher at school made us watch as a perfect example of Shakespearian Tragedy. Sean Penn plays Carlito’s lawyer Dave Kleinfeld, a brilliant Jew who gets sucked into his client’s former life of drugs and crime, the life Carlito is trying so hard to leave behind. There’s an exchange between the two that my man Alfie is particularly fond of. 

Carlito:

You ripped him off, didn’t you?


Kleinfeld:

What?


Carlito:

Tony T. You did take the million dollars, didn’t you?


Kleinfeld:

(guiltily) Yeah

Carlito:

You ain’t a lawyer no more, Dave. You a gangster now. On the other side. A whole new ball game. You can’t learn about it in school, and you can’t have a late start.

*

On my 30th birthday I threw a Miami Vice-themed party. My brother came as Kleinfeld. One of the best outfits I can remember. Pressed grey suit, starched white shirt with golden collar pin, yellow tie, blonde afro wig. Like all good art it went over most people’s heads. Those who got it were smiling to themselves all night.

He reddened the area around his nostrils and put flour everywhere. To show the mountain Kleinfeld’s nose was climbing on the daily to keep on top of his habit. Miguel told me people kept coming up to him at the party saying by the way mate, sick party, but you might want to sort your nose out. Funny thing is, my brother didn’t touch the narcs all night. He doesn’t do narcs all that much.

He does poems.

Here’s one, about my niece.

Regina Spektor sums the thing up so perfect it makes you think after all it was her barking orders at the Big Man when he went off on his 7-Day bender to bring the whole thing into existence back in the day.

This is how it works.


You’re young until you’re not.


You love until you don’t.


You try until you can’t.


You laugh until you cry.


You cry until you laugh.


And everyone must breathe…


Until their dying breath.


This is how it works.


You peer inside yourself.


You take the things you like.


And try to love the things you took.


And then you take that love you made.


And stick it into someone else’s heart.


Pumping someone else’s blood.


And walking arm in arm.


You hope it don’t get harmed.


But even if it does…


You’ll just do it all again.

*


Regina means Queen.

The broad cooking me dinner tonight has made public her intention to rustle up some chicken fajitas.



Someone missed the memo could be the understatement of the millenium.

If you take away my demons, you’ll take away my angels too.

W. H. Auden 1907-1973

Over the course of a few weeks on a mental bike trip through America a few years back, me and my man Wilma went into a bunch of diners and shops and had direct experience with americans and their own brand of hospitality. More specifically their strange ability to get away with the sentence oh good morning to you sir… take care and you be sure to have an absolutely fantastic day okay? without sounding completely disingenuous.

An English person says that to you and you have two options. Leg it or punch them in the face. After being on the receiving end of a few of these mid-morning eulogies, we realised that was simply the American way of saying yo. Same way a Parisian would grunt at you. Same way the Japanese would bow. It’s all the same, just a different way of saying it.

I asked Wilma the question, would you rather people be really polite to you but not mean any of it, or people be monosyllabically screwface, but at least be genuine. Wilma opted for the French state of affairs, saying he’d prefer realness with a scowl, over a smile laced with deep-loathing.

I’d say it’s a tough one.

When I’m in a shitty mood a Parisian being Parisian has the ability to cleave my world in two. WhenI’m in a shitty mood I’d take any number of kowtows or sycophantic morning greetings even if they meant nothing. Because to me they’d mean something.

I’d say as we get older most of us opt for the genuine over the fake. We’d rather be in the company of the few people we connect with, than be surrounded and at the same time feel isolated. Like the old man in the Werther’s ad. He was happy heavy-chilling in just the company of his grandson, imparting all the wisdom of his years to the little man over a delicious sweet.

I bet he’d take that over a night down at the Bingo chatting gas to his crew, none of which have been able to hear anything since 1989. Then again, older people tend to suffer more from loneliness, and so they become less discriminatory over company. That’s why you catch them speaking in tongues holding up the queue in Tesco’s. They just want to be with people. But we’re all lonely. Achingly lonely. Every single one of us. One thing is proven though. What’s good for you and for me is better for me than what’s only good for me. So why don’t we all be nice to each other, and mean it.

I have no idea where i’m going with this.

This is a tale of addiction and loss.

Of decline and fall.

But also of redemption, of growth, of wisdom accrued through suffering.

It all started one Sunday afternoon a little over a month ago, when I got back from a long weekend away and opening the fridge in the relaxed perfunctory manner of a man who hadn’t done a shop in recent memory, spied a glowing sun nestling behind a couple of non-alcoholic beers and a Jazz apple, imbuing its cold environs with a golden warmth.

Almond milk was a mystery to me. The dregs of this carton formed part of my flatmate’s smug plans to make the ultimate bircher muesli. He wasn’t around, and last time I checked he was abroad somewhere, being smug, the kind of place where almond milk flows untapped from bountiful almond springs.

So I thought what the hell.

I took a sip. And as the liquid washed over my tongue, past my palate and cliff-dropped into my stomach, something happened. Sadly all three drops in there meant that not enough of it happened. I threw the carton in the bin, thinking not much more of it. But that night, vivid dreams of diving Scrooge MacDuck into pools of golden almonds and torrents of milky rivers flooded my somnolent brain.

I woke up in the morning sodden, and wandering over to the kitchen, froze, mid nut-scratch, as the carton of Almond Milk sat there staring back at me from the kitchen counter.

Weird, I thought.

These guys aren’t easy to locate. But the following Wednesday I went into my local Health Shop, the kind of place you have to stumble over two crates of chia seeds just to get through the door. Browsing constellations of products I’d never before laid eyes on, I finally located the right shelf, and with the self-satisfied grin of a man just texted back by his dealer, took the plunge.

I brought one back home, locked the door, stripped down into something more comfortable, took it, shook it, twisted the cap and long-armed half the carton.

Most people describe their first heroin experience as nothing particularly incredible. No obvious upperlike coke, no love-surge like pills or God-delusion like meth. Just a mellow life is okay after all moment. I wouldn’t know, but having taken my first hit of almond milk I’d say scratch that I definitely do.

I hit it again. And again. And before I knew it the carton was done, and I was legging it down the road in my Y-fronts to score some more.

When it comes to drugs there are gateway theories.

The idea is that weed leads to LSD or pills, onto coke, crack and then heroin. Something like that. But my own personal descent into hell went something like this.

Almond milk.

Worrying amounts of almond milk.

At around three quid a pop my new habit didn’t come cheap and greenbacks don’t grow on trees, so like all men who love a bargain but refuse to compromise on quality, I hit up M&S. I scoured the shelves, but no almond milk was to be found.

I did find… Oat Drink.

Jackpot. I real lingering semi-sweet but not quite aftertaste, and with it the delusion it was a little bit good for you. What drug does that.

M&S Oat Drink was good. So I decided to sample more of their shit.

Coconut Drink.

Just like these two cats I’ve fallen foul of the allure of Coconut water in my time.

Could coconut milk do the same? I had to say I was worried about the coke to crack effect.

My fears were unfounded, Coconut milk is disgusting. It’s an embarrassment to the whole non-milk milk scene. I’m not sure I took more than one sip before head-butting the carton in a show of raw uncut contempt. It exploded all over my face and dripped down into a huge puddle of coconut milk which began seeping across the supermarket floor.

But M&S did have… Rice Drink.

That’s when things got really weird.

That’s when I stopped seeing people. 

I took Keith Richard’s advice about the purity of the drugs you take, sacked off M&S and went back to the Mother Ship. Rude Health. Accept no substitutes. As fiercely addictive as Brown Rice Drink is, it’s more of a party drug rather than an every day thing. And so I kept coming back to Almond. On heavier sessions I’d hit the Almond for hours, and then straight arm a Brown Rice to take the edge off.

Once I’d bought out the entire stock of E8, I made the mistake of straying into E5 one day and picked up a carton of this.

Don’t ever fuck with a milk product that has both Arabic and Chinese on it and expires in December 2027.

I decided to stock-pile with a view to dealing, to even up the books. But dealer’s discipline is learnt the hard way, and I spent the next 18 hours getting high on my own supply. The next four days passed by in a blur. Until finally, I came to, buttnaked, on the floor of my own bathroom, squealing like a newborn.

I was 4 stone heavier. I mean, last time I checked I wasn’t drinking six litres of full-fat milk a day.

*


This is as much a warning to others, as a sorry tale of loss of personal wealth and dignity. Steer well clear of these non-dairy milk substitutes. We’ve been milking cows for millennia, stick to the classics. Besides, I missed the most glaringly obvious point of all. They’re far too sweet anyway.

Hey, at least I can say I finally understand all of Pulp Fiction.

That thing right there, seeping out of the left-hand corner of her mouth…

… I always wondered what that was.

Life is fresh crack is wack.

Keith Haring 1986 NYC

Hey…. Old Man!

Spin that shit.

Spin it already.

The look.

The look Rihanna gives on 0:18 is basically all I ever want in a woman. 

This one.